Pirate Bay, Torrent Sites Temporarily Crippled By DDoS Attack

The Pirate Bay and a handful of other torrent sites were temporarily shut down by a DDoS attack on Tuesday, according to TorrentFreak.

A Twitter user who was reportedly denied an invitation to one of the sites decided to take his or her frustrations out on the entire BitTorrent community. The individual, who goes by the name Zeiko, began assaulting several sites with distributed denial-of-security (DDoS) attacks yesterday morning. As a result, The Pirate Bay and its ilk reported extended periods of downtime.

After taking aim at several private BitTorrent communities, the enraged Twitter user shifted his focus to public sites. Before long, it was announced that The Pirate Bay had become a target.

According to iT News, Zeiko claimed responsibility for taking down one of the world’s largest public BitTorrent trackers on the micro-blogging website. The individual also claims to have knocked Fenopy and isoHunt offline during his DDoS attacks. All of the sites have since recovered from the assault.

“It’s just a normal SYN flood from a small botnet,” a member of the Pirate Bay team explained to TorrentFreak. “We’re taking the break to do some much-needed database upgrades. The site will come back as soon as we’re done with that.”

Despite opposition from nearly every copyright holder on the planet, The Pirate Bay continues to help connect people with all sorts of pirated material. The website is currently one of the top 50 most visited sites on the internet. The site is listed 13th in Sweden.

In October, The Pirate Bay announced it was moving to the cloud. The relocation would ultimately help prevent these sort of situations from shutting the website down for extended lengths of time.

“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” a representative from the site explained. “If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”